Introducing “Mass Exodus & the New Megalopolis”

I will be presenting a brief introduction to “Mass Exodus and the New Megalopolis” at the Post Planetary Capital Symposium this Monday, March 24th, at The Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School for Design.

“Mass Exodus and the New Megalopolis” is a research project my colleagues Berkay Guney, Mateusz Rek, and I are working on as part of Ed Keller’s Post-Planetary Design seminar at Parsons.

I have included an excerpt from the presentation below:

Historical development and migration, based on oceanic exploration and shipping, have left us with a legacy of increasingly obsolete port cities facing an ever increasing threat from catastrophic storms and rising tides. Existing proposals to mitigate this situation are mere temporary solutions.

Sea level rise threatens the majority of the world’s urban population and a percentage of the total population that will only increase over time. Long term projections of global sea level rise show the areas this population calls home permanently under water in the not so distant future (100-600 years). The eventual relocation of the majority of the world’s population is inevitable.

This mass exodus, relocation, and resulting development will present many social, cultural, political, economic, environmental, infrastructural, and architectural challenges as well as opportunities. – Opportunities which will take 100 years or more to implement, preceded by decades or more of research, policy, and planning. Serious foundations for this must be implemented within our lifetimes if we are to not only avoid catastrophe but seize the inherent opportunities of the situation.

Our research centers around three main areas of inquiry: the future of existing cities, the emergence of new metropolitan hubs, and the resultant and necessary network of the future megalopolis, along with the implications each of these may have, or opportunities these present, for the surrounding landscape.

For those of you interested but unable to attend on Monday, I will post the full presentation here following the symposium.